The advent of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems has reduced operating costs for many types of businesses for providing services. Generally, the IVR systems allow a user to interact with an audio or visual response system. The IVR systems can provide prompts to a user and receive touch tone and/or spoken responses on the prompts from the user. Through such IVR dialogue the system collects sufficient information about the user to direct the call to the most appropriate resource, information processing system or the like.
In particular, the IVR Systems have allowed telephone service providers to host call centers for various businesses such as banks, insurance companies, restaurants, and other service providers. An objective of implementing the IVR systems is to provide the users or customers with a quick and good experience. Usually, the customer care executives/agents or audio IVR systems associated with the service providers call users of communication devices to offer or sell their services or products. When a user at a communication device receives a call from the agents or the audio IVR system, the user may not know the purpose of the call. Further, the user receiving the call may not know about the services provided by the calling service provider. Therefore, the user may have to listen to the calling service provider patiently and completely to know the purpose of the call and to know about their various services. Further, the desire to inquire about various other services of the service provider. This whole process may be time consuming and sometimes may be frustrating for the user.
Sometimes, it may be possible that the calling service provider does not include the information or resource desired by the user. Therefore, even after listening to the agent or audio IVR system, the user may not get the desired information. In such a case, either the user may have to wait for long time or contact some other service provider.
Some existing techniques try to address this problem by providing visual form of IVR. These techniques display the IVR menu graphically on a caller device. U.S. Pat. No. 7,215,743 assigned to International Business Machines Corporation and a published U.S. patent application with Ser. No. 11/957,605, filed Dec. 17, 2007 and assigned to Motorola Inc., provides the IVR menu of the first party device in a visual form to the caller. The caller can select the options from the IVR menu without listening to the complete audio IVR menu. However, the IVR menu displayed on the caller device is stored on an IVR server of a call receiving or service provider end. As a result, the visual IVR menu is specific to the call receiving end and only the IVR of the call receiving end is displayed. These techniques therefore, require each call receiving end to set-up hardware, software and other facilities to be deployed for providing visual IVR servers. Moreover, the visual form of audio IVR menu is displayed only when the caller dials and connects to the IVR at service provider's end.
In the light of the above discussion, techniques are desired for providing enhanced telephony.